Biblical
Worship. Revelation 4:5-8
In the expression of praise
to God in verse 8 the emphasis is on His holiness, but the one who is being
praised in the Father, not the Son. There has been some confusion because some look
at the phrase “who is to come” and think in terms of Jesus at the Second
Coming, but in chapter 21 we see that God the Father Himself comes and takes up
residence with man in the new Heavens and the new earth. He is the one who is
to come. Throughout the book the phrase “Lord God Almighty” always refers to
the Father. If we think about it, in this scene in chapter four there is one
sitting upon the throne but the Lamb who is the Son of God comes before the one
who is sitting on the throne in chapter five, so obviously these are two
distinct persons. So this cannot be a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, it
must be a reference to God the Father.
The focus of this praise is
on His holiness. There is another aspect of this that we have to deal with. In the
Majority Text there is a major textual problem here: it says, “holy, holy,
holy, holy holy, holy, holy,
holy, holy—nine “holys,” three for each of the three
members of the Trinity. That is found in the vast majority of Greek MSS, which is
why it is called the Majority Text. There are some variations there but for our
purposes it doesn’t change any doctrine, the focus of this phrase is on the
integrity of God as the one who is holy. What does “holy” mean? Very few people
understand what holy really means. We think of holiness primarily to mean that
which has perfect righteousness, that which is morally pure. But that isn’t the
core meaning of this word. The New Testament concept of holy—HAGIOS/a(gioj is based on the Old Testament revelation of the
holiness of God, and in the Old Testament the verb that is used to describe the
holiness of God—and the noun comes from a root that has three basic consonants
of q, b and sh. The noun is qodesh. Yet, there is one form of the masculine noun
and one form of the feminine noun that is used to describe the temple
prostitutes in the fertility religion of the worship of the Baalim. This is
where the worshipper would go into these groves or designated pagan temples and
engage in sexual intercourse with these temple prostitutes as an act of
fertility in order to motivate the gods to make the soil fertile. That was the
emphasis in the pagan religions and the temple prostitutes were called by this
root word. This gives us the root meaning. It is not morally pure because they
were not morally pure. They were totally dedicated to the service of their god.
And that is the root meaning of holiness, to be set apart for the service of
God. There was furniture in the temple that was described as holy, but if holy
has the core meaning of being morally pure you couldn’t describe an inanimate
object that way because a bowl of piece of furniture could not be either moral
or immoral. So it has the root idea of being set apart for the service of God
or simply to be set apart.
When this is used to describe
the character of God it is emphasizing that God Himself is completely set
apart, completely distinct from His creation. It emphasizes again this whole
idea of the creator-creature distinction, that God is not like the creature,
not just a human being that is much larger with greater powers with more
intellect, but He is something that is totally other and distinct and that we
cannot understand Him logically because the Old Testament says that His
thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. So can only
understand Him through analogy, through figures of speech, through points of
contact that are common to our experience where we can have some idea of who he
is and what He is like. But this emphasizes the fact that he is so completely
distinct that He is the one who is worthy of worship. As a secondary idea many
passages bring into the concept of holiness the idea of His perfect
righteousness and justice, because if we examine this whole context of
Revelation chapters four and five we see that this is a focal point on the
operation of His justice. His righteousness is the standard of His character,
it is absolutely perfect; His justice is the outworking, the application of
that perfect righteousness toward His creatures. His righteousness and His
justice combine together and often you will read theologians who define
holiness as the combination of His righteousness and His justice, but it is
more than that, it is something that sets God completely apart from all of His
creatures. So the picture that we have here is that because He is holy, because
of His absolute perfect, because of His perfect justice, he is the one, and the
only one, who is qualified to bring judgment on mankind and to execute justice
over evil in the history of mankind. And what we see in this chapter is what
Jesus mentioned in John 5: “All judgment has been given to me by the Father.”
That happens in chapter five when the scroll is brought forward and the Lamb of
God comes forward. This is when the judgment is delegated from God the Father
as the ultimate supreme judge of the universe to His Son who is both man and
God, and he as our peer judge, as one who is fully human, is the one who brings
about judgment on the human race. The foundation is being paid in chapter four
for the actions that occur in chapter five. The emphasis in on His holiness and
His power; he is the Lord God Almighty, the eternal and everlasting one.
When we come to the book of
Revelation we can observe five different characteristics of the “living
beings,” v. 8. It is an important part of any kind of Bible study to understand
how something is used within the book or the epistle that is being studied. It
is important to do a study of earlier books that have been written but we need
to understand how something is used within a book itself, and since these
living beings play an important role in the outworking of the justice of God in
Revelation it will help us if we just glance at a couple of passages as we do
this. These four living beings are always before the throne of God and the Lamb
of God—4:6; 5:6. They have six wings and are full of eyes. The wings indicate
their power and the eyes indicate the extent of their knowledge and their
awareness of all that is going on around them. When they are pictured in
Revelation they are engaged in praising God for His character, the focus is on
who God is and what He has done—4:8; 5:9. (Note that 5:9 says that He is worthy
because He was slain and He has redeemed us to God by His blood—the term “blood
of Christ” is not to be taken literally, it is a term that is an idiom for the
spiritual death of Christ on the cross)
They are seen falling down and worshipping God in
So these living beings are
described as worshipping and praising God. They have special duties to perform
such as calling forth for the dreadful manifestations of the judgments of God.
In 6:1 we read, “Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I
heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder,
‘Come.’” So the living creatures were taking the apostle John to show him the
outworking of the justice of God. And again in 6:7, “When the Lamb broke the
fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, ‘Come.’”
So they have these special duties as witnesses and revealers of the outworking
of the judgment of God. One of them is involved in handing over one of the
bowls of the wrath of God in 15:7, “Then one of the four living creatures gave
to the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the
wrath of God, who lives forever and ever.”
These creatures are very similar to those that we already
find in Scripture. Ezekiel 1 where we have a picture of the same kind of thing
that we see in Revelation 4 & 5, a picture of the throne of God described
by Ezekiel in terms of his own frame of reference. Our focus here is just on
these living creatures. Ezekiel 1:5 NASB “Within it there were
figures resembling four living beings. And this was their appearance: they had
human form.” This is a vision that takes place in 592 BC just after the second invasion of Nebuchadnezzar into the promised land where Ezekiel is taken captive back to
Passages like Isaiah 37:16
talk about God as Yahweh of hosts,
the Lord of the armies, the God of Israel, the one who dwells between these
cherubim. Psalm
This sets us up for
investigating and understanding what the Bible teaches about worship, something
that confuses a lot of people today, something that is
a point of tremendous concern in a lot of congregations today.
Rev 4:11 “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of
Your will they existed, and were created.”